Be not afraid

Last week I spent three posts describing the origins of my disbelief in the existence of a God, and the reasons that the idea of a God, and especially the Christian God, are completely unsatisfactory in the face of any rational consideration.

One thing that no one said but a few people hinted at was along the lines of “Look, it may not make sense. It may not be even true. But it helps people live better lives, so why not just let them have it?”

And my answer is: because it doesn’t. What religion does is make people live in fear.

SLOW DOWN!

A couple videos for you today, both on the same theme. The first, a TED Talk.

TED now has an iTunes feed, where every day they upload a new talk from their massive library of insightful discussions. I have talks running in the background as I work pretty much every day, and I’m skipping around to what sounds interesting.

Today I ran across this talk, a talk from TED 2005 by journalist Carl Honore.

This is an important topic, and was especially noteworth for me since I’ve got a bunch of things happening at once, and my attempts to do them all quickly and simultaneously makes it such that I get very few of them done at all.

I think a lot of us have things we want to get done or a place we feel like we need to be going. But this is all there is (depending on your spiritual persuasion, I guess, but that’s a topic that I will address in forthcoming posts), and we should enjoy it now and again.

The other video is a little stop-motion short film made by a dear friend of mine. The film was made for a “film festival” among our friends — i.e. everybody make a film if you want to and then we’ll screen them all at a party. It’s called “Going Postal”, and based on the title I expected…well, something quite different than what I got. But the visuals and the story have such heart and such humor, and the music is so perfectly chosen, that I found myself deeply moved by the video and am still moved every time I see it.

She disabled the embedding on the video, but click here to check it out on the YouTube page. It’ll be good to go directly to it anyway, so you can bookmark it for a gloomy day.

On Content and Copyright

I’m going to have a lot more to say on this subject in the future. My father is an attorney who quite literally wrote the book on copyright law in the digital realm. I personally have made my “fame” (if not my fortune) piggybacking on the success and love of fans for their favorite franchise. So this is a big deal and it won’t go untouched-upon.

But for now, let me just link you a video, a TED-Talk. TED is a fascinating concept — it stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and is an annual meeting in Monterey, California where 1000 luminaries, from those three worlds, come together to share ideas.

That’s the main goal: sharing ideas.

I’ll undoubtedly post more TED-Talks in the future, as well, but for now, I was pointed to this one and it’s extremely significant. I’ve never attended a TED conference and will probably never be invited to do so. But I’m with them, and believe in what they’re aiming to achieve. And so, I share these ideas with you.

EDIT: Tried to post a video, but their embed code is faulty. A link will have to do.

Check out the rest of their site while you’re at it.